Today in History:
Lawrence Textile Strike Begins in Massachusetts (1912)
The Lawrence textile strike was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Prompted by one mill owner's decision to lower wages when a new law shortening the workweek went into effect in January, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers at nearly every mill within a week. The strike, which lasted more than two months and which defied the assumptions of conservative unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized, was successful; a year later, however, the union had largely collapsed and most of the gains achieved by the workers had disappeared.
The Lawrence strike is often known as the "Bread and Roses" strike, or, "The Strike for Three Loaves".
The first known source to do so was a 1916 labor anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair. Prior to that, the slogan, used as the title of a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim, had been attributed to "Chicago Women Trade Unionists". It has also been attributed to socialist union organizer Rose Schneiderman.
Source: encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com
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